lui dipinta gli
apparve in sogno, domandandolo dove egli l' avesse veduta si
brutta._[29]
(_Vite de' piu eccellenti pittori, da Messer
Giorgio Vasari.--"Vita di Spinello."_)

[29] "And so successful was Spinello with his horrible and
portentous Production that it was commonly reported--so great
is always the force of fancy--that the said figure (of
Lucifer trodden underfoot by St. Michael in the Altar-Piece
of the Church of St. Agnolo at Arezzo) painted by him had
appeared to the artist in a dream, and asked him in what
place he had beheld him under so brutish a form."

_Lives of the most Excellent Painters_, by Giorgio
Vasari.--"Life of Spinello."

Andrea Tafi, painter and worker-in-mosaic of Florence, had a wholesome
terror of the Devils of Hell, particularly in the watches of the
night, when it is given to the powers of Darkness to prevail. And the
worthy man's fears were not unreasonable, for in those days the Demons
had good cause to hate the Painters, who robbed them of more souls
with a single picture than a good little Preaching Friar could do in
thirty sermons. No doubt the Monk, to instil a soul-saving horror in
the hearts of the faithful, would describe to the utmost of his
powers "that day of wrath, that day of mourning," which is to reduce
the universe to ashes, _teste David et Sibylla_, borrowing his deepest
voice and bellowing through his hands to imitate the Archangel's last
trump. But there! it was "all sound and fury, signifying nothing,"
whereas a painting displayed on a Chapel wall or in the Cloister,
showing Jesus Christ sitting on the Great White Throne to judge the
living and the dead, spoke unceasingly to the eyes of sinners, and
through the eyes chastened such as had sinned by the eyes or
otherwise.

It was in the days when cunning masters were depicting at Santa-Croce
in Florence and the Campo Santo of Pisa the mysteries of Divine
Justice. These works were drawn according to the account in verse
which Dante Alighieri, a man very learned in Theology and in Canon
Law, wrote in days gone by of his journey to Hell, and Purgatory and
Paradise, whither by the singular great merits of his lady, he was
able to make his way alive. So everything in these paintings was
instructive and true, and we may say surely less profit is to be had
of reading the most full a